[sane-devel] EPKOWA Epseon PF 3590 Photo

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Johannes Meixner <jsmeix at suse.de> writes:

> Hello,
>
> On Oct 18 09:08 Olaf Meeuwissen wrote (shortened):
>> Levente Novák <lnovak at dragon.klte.hu> writes:
>> > I thought the linux and windows drivers are at the same level of
>> > functionality.
>> 
>> Most definitely not.  The Windows drivers do quite a bit in software
>> that is not done by the epkowa backend.  The iscan frontend does some
>> of it but whatever it does has not been updated for the last 2 years
>> or so.
>
> I assume it depends on the particular model whether or not
> there is full support under Linux.
> In particular I expect less support under Linux for those models
> which require a non-free module (like the Perfection 3590 PHOTO).
>
> Olaf,
> might there be less functionality under Linux even for those models
> which are reported as "complete" in
> http://www.sane-project.org/lists/sane-backends-external.html#S-EPKOWA
> ?

That depends on the feature set you use to compare.  If you include
all the things you can do with the device using the vendor supplied
driver, then you should probably mark all devices in epson.desc and
epkowa.desc that are now marked "complete" to "good".
# Just to make things clear, iscan is not a vendor supplied driver.

If you limit the feature set to all that the hardware can do, then
most of the older models are probably "complete".  For the newer
models I would say that the majority is somewhere between "complete"
and "good".  There have been additions to the scanner protocol that
have not been implemented in the backend (yet?).  The scanners that
require a binary-only non-free plugin, the status is "good" at best,
but you could argue that "basic" is closer to the truth.  Wherever
limitations are known, I've added a little blurb in the comment.  If
there are things missing, let me know (patches preferred).

> Of course I mean only the scanning functionality and not stuff
> like the nice buttons for e-mail, printing and whatever
> or printing and/or faxing functionality for all-in-one devices.

See, you're limiting the feature set already.  Those scan buttons are
part of the scanner functionality, not?
# Not that I'd like to implement support for it right now ;-)

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen                          EPSON AVASYS Corporation, LAN
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